social exclusion, the church and proclaiming the gospel
June 7, 2006
Here's something to read: the Archbishop of York's letter to The Guardian, and an article by Fran Beckett about the Church and social exclusion. One of the things we're bad at as churches is blowing our own trumpets. Now, that's an obvious virtue. But what's the balance between blowing our own trumpets (hiss! boo!) and proclamation (hooray!)? We are in the business of proclaiming Good News. Good News in a Christian sense doesn't exist as some sort of free-floating message. It is Good News - Gospel - to a world governed by Bad News. It has to become incarnate, which means that it needs to take shape on the ground. The Good News about Jesus is not about escaping to heaven but about heaven coming down to earth. It is about our reality being transformed - our world becoming the kingdom of God.
There's a direct relationship, in other words, between our disciplehip of and faith in Jesus and our actions in the world - between proclamation and mission. To be a disciple of Jesus Christ is to be involved in God's story of salvation for the world. That is why we do what we do. We cannot neglect either aspect of it. The missiologist, David Bosch, distinguishes helpfully between evangelical dimension and evangelical intention. Not everything we do is explicitly aimed at calling people to faith in Christ (intention). But everything has an evangelical dimension because it is intimately connected to the story of God in Christ.
A vital part of mission is therefore always to make explicit the connection between what we do and our faith. The task of proclamation is to establish the congruence between our living and acting in the world in the light of the kingdom, on the one hand, and our faith that God has acted in Christ to save the world. That is when our actions to combat social exclusion, feed the hungry, clothe naked, comfort the suffering and liberate the oppressed truly become the Good News of Jesus Christ.
israel and palestine: the new apartheid (2)
June 3, 2006
At the height of Apartheid, the standard of living for white South Africans was exceeded only by that of Californian Americans. I was staying with my parents in Cape Town in 1989. It was a beautiful place to be. Dining out was a pleasure - huge portions of delicious food (especially beef and seafood) - and so cheap by comparison with the UK! Yet at the same time, not 30 miles away, in the so called "Independent Homelands", black South Africans were literally starving to death. Bishop Malusi Mpumulwana told a conference I hosted in Cambridge of his experience of a Eucharist held in one of these areas just outside Cape Town. A woman brought her baby to the altar, and held it up to Malusi not for a blessing, but for the bread. He told her gently, "Daughter, our tradition does not allow children to eat the bread and drink the wine. But I will happily bless your baby!" The woman retorted, "Father, this bread will be the only food my child eats all weekend! We are starving - and you would refuse this? And yet you tell us that Jesus is the Bread of Life!"
The reason for black starvation was that the South African government controlled the access to and distribution of resources. So called "separate development" had nothing whatsoever to do with equality. It meant annexing resources and benefits for white South Africa. Whites enjoyed the standard of living they did because a panoply of laws excluded 35 million people from a slice of the economic cake!
Something similar is happening to the Palestinians. The Wall has annexed the water supplies. Israelis and settlers fill their swimming pools and water their lawns while Palestinians have to buy water by the tanker load because supplies have run out. Bethlehem is out of water, and it is summer - desperately hot. There are no regular supplies of electricity. People are desperate for food and the shops are empty. Cut off rom their fields and olive groves, they can neither grow or earn money to buy food. Food has to be transported in, and that means trying to pass through the Israeli checkpoints. Israel, the paymaster, has refused to pay any salaries to the Palestinian Authority since Hamas was elected, on the grounds that they are a terrorist organisation and any salaries would amount to state funding for terrorism. That means, in effect, that most other salaries also remain unpaid. Charities are being asked not for money, or clothing, or other items, but for food. New legislation in the US means that charities there demand astounding, impossible amounts of information and paperwork from any Palestinian recipients of funding, so that aid is drying up to a trickle.
Whatever our politics, we need to recognise that this is a humanitarian crisis. People are dying for lack of food and water. What is particularly obscene is that this is a crisis created quite deliberately. The Palestinians are a community under seige. The Israelis can act with impunity because there is a deafening silence from the international community. Not only that, but they receive the active backing of the US because of the power of the Christian and Jewish votes in that country. The Christian and Jewish communities. These are the two faith communities whose God is Yaweh - God of the Exodus, liberator of slaves, enemy of oppression. Jesus is the one who announced the Good News that the kingdom of God is for the least first; who said "Blessed are you poor; woe to you who are rich! Blessed are you hungry; woe to you who are filled!" How is it that this same God and same saviour can be enlisted to justify cruelty and oppression, and blindness to the plight of the helpless, save by some demonic sleight of hand?
"Love your neighbour as yourself", Jesus said. That means putting ourselves in the place of our neighbour. How would we feel if we had no water, food, electricity or money? And what would we be asking of our brothers and sisters? Whatever our answer, that is what is being required of us.
israel and palestine: the new apartheid
May 30, 2006
Apartheid was a violent system. It wasn't just the overt violence of the militarisation of the townships, the assassinations, the arbitrary arrests and torture - it was the daily attacks on the humanity, freedom of movement, rights to association, expression, education and normal family life from the system that shaped everyday Black existence. Systems, in other words can be violent. It's a violence you don't see because it's how life is. The point, however, is that in a violent system, overt violence is neither surprising nor exceptional. It is the endemic violence breaking out into the open.
That's not how it "plays" to the outside world, of course. The news reports used to be full of "outbreaks" of Black violence - acts of terrorism, rioting, communist subversion etc. The implication was clear: this had nothing to do with people responding to violence inflicted on them, but was an instance of unjustified and ungrateful unruliness and general inclination to violent disorder! Yet it was nothing of the kind. It was the response of people who found themselves under daily attack. When a political system is predicated upon a group within that society being less than fully human, less deserving of the normal human rights, is grudgingly tolerated and accorded the minimum of respect and space, the system is effectively a constant attack and exercise of force over that group to keep them in subjugation. If the default mode is that they have no right to be there, then every concession towards what everyone else would take for granted is regarded by the state as a generous gift, and every protest or demand for equality an instance of outrageous selfishness and ingratitude. If the oppressed group's response becomes violent in answer to the violence being inflicted on them - if, in other words, the oppressed group dares to fight back - they are characterised as terrorists.
Tragically, ruling groups - states - find a ready audience for this sort of Orwellian rhetoric in the international community. States are generally regarded as legitimate (if occassionally a little oppressive or flawed). It is appallingly easy for any state to brand protest and violent response as "terrorism", and notoriously difficult for people to recognise that states themselves can be terrorist. We talk about Libya and Syria as "terrorist states" in connection with "state-sponsored terrorism". The notion of a state as a "terror organisation" is far more difficult to comprehend - emotionally, as well as intellectually. The presence of the trappings of legitimacy - the police, the army, the judiciary, the organs of government - means that states can pass and enforce laws which are in fact attacks on its citizens. They can deploy their armed forces to carry out policies that in any other context would be deemed acts of war, or terrorism. That is what happened in South Africa under Apartheid. It is what is happening now in Israel.
According to Lenin, "The purpose of terror is to terrify". Terror is not some sort of playground bullying writ large, nor is it sadism and evil on a grand scale (though of course, all those elements can be present in individuals). It is a deliberate strategy. I learned this interrogating many Zimbabwean guerillas during the Independence Struggle. I had always thought that "terrorists" were simply bad people - bullies with guns. Crucially, for me, they lost any claim to being "liberators" because the principal victims of terror were their own people. I came to realise that this wasn't the case. The argument I heard went something like this: "You accuse us of terror and war-mongering. Yet our people live in daily terror because of your laws. We are not safe in our own houses. You see yourselves as peaceful, reasonable people - but that is only because you are insulated against the fear and daily violence that you are committing against us. You do not have to be violent - although you will be ruthlesslessly violent as soon as it seems necessary. You are safe because we are weak. You think that when our people smile and fawn, that we are grateful? Not so. We are cowed and terrified! The people are very scared. They fear you. If we soldiers come to free them, they will betray us - even though they agree with us - because they are so scared of what you might do to them. So we want to make them more afriad of us than of you. Then they will help us and join the struggle." I used to respond, "But then they are acting out of fear. Surely you want to win their trust and support? You cannot win hearts and minds through terror!" The response I got was this: "When you have a man by the balls, his heart and mind will follow! This is what we have learned from you".
The relevance to the Palestinian situation is this: Palestinian violence is the violence of response to attack. Palestinian terror is a response to the terror inflicted on the people by Israel. Its cause doesn't lie in some Palestinian propensity to lawlessness, violence and barbarism, but in the daily violence inflicted on the community by the Israeli state. Prior to the current Intafada, it was inconceivable that Hamas could have won a Palestinian election. Yet the violence of the Israeli state has radicalised the whole community. The Palestinains see the Hamas fighters as liberators - as protectors who are resisting in their name. They support Hamas because they see it as the only credible response to the war being waged against that community.
When the Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert addresses both houses of Congress, therefore, and insists that any precondition to negotiation with the Palestinian Authority under Mahmoud Abbas is that the Palestinians “renounce terrorism, dismantle the terrorist infrastructure, accept previous agreements and commitments, and recognize the right of Israel to exist", we need to recognise this for the cant and subterfuge it really is. In effect, it's like the school bully sitting astride his victim, hitting him and rubbing his face into the dirt, and saying, "I'll only think of stopping this when you stop resisting and crying and objecting!" It's saying to the Palestinians, "We're at war with you. And we'll only even think of stopping when you first surrender!" There is no real negotiation envisaged. There is no intention to withdraw from the settlements. The Wall is to form the permament border between Israel and the Palestinian territories - a border which has already been extended to annexe 10% of the Palestinian land - crucially, the 10% holding all the water supplies! There is no offer of a viable Palestinian state - simply a patchwork of small, isolated "outcrops" of Palestinian land which are cut off from one another.
Israel, with the active support of the United States, is thumbing its nose at UN resolutions demanding an end to the oppression of the people there. Instead, what Israel envisages is succeeding where South Africa failed - in the project of Apartheid. Apartheid (significantly pronounced "apart-hate" in Afrikaans!) was always translated as "separate development". This is a literal enough translation of the term - but it carefully omits and disguises what Steve Biko spotted only too clearly and lost his life for: it is a means of oppressing and subjugating the people it excludes. It is an act of war on its own citizens; system of violent terror. In our Reformed theological tradition, a government which is the enemy of the people is a tyrant, and needs to be removed. Israel is a terrorist state as far as the Palestinian question is concerned. It is a tragic and often-noted irony that the people whose national identity was formed by the Holocaust should act as they do to the Palestinians. It is ironic that Olmert's address was drafted with the help of the Holocaust author and Nobel Peace Prize winner, Elie Wiesel. Wiesel knows better than most that the Holocaust was made possible only by the silence of the wider international community over Germany's actions. The Nazis mounted an active campaign of terror against its population and the world kept silent. Now Olmert wants - and is getting - the same silence over his own terror policies against the Palestinians.
the royal tour
November 2, 2005
It's been far too long since I was actively blogging here! I blame the start of the church year - September and October have been manic. So Charles and Camilla begin their US tour today. And the question is, can Camilla woo the Diana-ites over? Isn't it tragic that a marriage is public property in the way that Charles' marriages have been? I write as an ardent anti-royalist, but on this one, I want to put in a plea for Charles. What a bizarre system we have here in the UK! The heir to the throne had to marry a "suitable" wife. Apart from anything else, she had to be a virgin (and be tested!). So on all sorts of grounds, Charles the human being is prevented from marrying the woman he loves. Well, let's be candid: he's prevented from marrying for love, full stop. In the 20th century (an nothing's changed with the new millennium) we are still running a system of royal marriage as alliance! I have every sympathy with Diana when she complained that there were three people in her marriage (to say nothing of the numbers she herself brought to the party!). Diana was treated very shabbily by her husband. But I still blame the system. We assume that the heart of the marriage relationship is love and the desire to be together. The bit in the service about "forsaking all others" presumes that the reason for getting married to this particular person is because this is the person one wishes to spend life with, rather than anyone else. Marriages are under enough pressure at the best of times: imagine having had to plan with the woman you love how to go about marrying someone else! Poor guy! So here's my one and only plea for sympathy for the royals. We set them up - we put them into impossible situations like this, then we demand a fairytale story of them and are outraged when it doesn't happen. One of my chief problems with the monarchy is that the system wrecks lives - theirs! And we are the ones who do it.
bush the new (moderate) crusader!
October 7, 2005
Did you catch Bush's latest "state of the union" address on the war against terror? I'm still depressed about it! Here is a man who sees the presence of American and British troops in Iraq as an obvious good. He inveighed against radical islamic terrorists and their jaundiced view of the world, their war against humanity, their hubris (look it up, George - it's a particular kind of sin, which caused the fall of Lucifer in the story) and their wicked, amoral and determined war against humanity.
Now let's be clear. What bin Laden and his ilk do is godless and inexcusable. Absolutely. But it is understandable! Or at least, partially. And what Bush will not have is that he and his policies are part cause of it. He gives them the reason, the excuse and the mandate. He talks of the terrorists' war on democracy and on people who enjoy liberty. And he's blissfully, sublimely and culpably unaware of the affront that American aggression gives! He clearly hasn't stopped to ask himself how the good ol' American people who (didn't actually) elect him (first time round) would react if there were Iraqi soldiers on the streets of New York and other cities and towns. And if they claimed to be there for the good of humanity, does he honestly suppose that irate Americans would say, "Oh! Silly us! That's ok, then!"?
The trouble is, I think he actually does think that! But what really gets me is that he dresses it mall up in terms of a Christian crusade. It's as extreme, fundamentalist and deadly a crusade as any waged by militant islamists. And it's got a lot of power and money behind it. For God's sake (literally) will someone make him realise it hasn't got God's blessing????
read this and be very, very afraid …
August 24, 2005
Go and look at this page, called The American Taliban. It's a page of quotes from prominent Americans. A number of them are church leaders. Others are politicians, serving in the Bush Administration.
Take James Watt, Secretary for the Interior. He says, "We don't have to protect the environment, the Second Coming is at hand." Way to go, James! So the Church is released from its mandate under the 5th Mark of Mission to preserve the environment!
How about George Bush snr: "I don't know that atheists should be considered citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God." One neation, George? Not if you can help it! And which God? Not mine!
But some of the really chilling stuff is about an appropriate Christian response to terrorism. Now I've always bought into the notion that, if women ran the world - particularly mothers - we'd probably have no war. And of course, if they were all Christian mothers, well, that would clinch it! Ann Coulter, a prominent Christian mother who is an attorney, a syndicated columnist and author who would like to run the world, has shown me the error of my ways:
"We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity. We weren't punctilious about locating and punishing only Hitler and his top officers. We carpet-bombed German cities; we killed civilians. That's war. And this is war."
"Not all Muslims may be terrorists, but all terrorists are Muslims."
"Being nice to people is, in fact, one of the incidental tenets of Christianity, as opposed to other religions whose tenets are more along the lines of 'kill everyone who doesn't smell bad and doesn't answer to the name Mohammed'"
So is Tony planning to bar all these people from entering Britain too because of preaching racial hatred? And will rightwing foreign Christians also face deportation? Or is it only if you happen to be Muslim?
stop the wall!
August 23, 2005
Homileo pointed me to a photo album of the apartheid wall being erected by the Israelis to seal in Palestinians (yes, I know they claim it's to keep out suicide bombers, but they use it to exclude Palestinians from Israeli territory, regardless of how long they've lived there. I spoke to a Palestinain who found himself and his family on the wrong side of the wall. His business was in Jerusalem, and he can no longer get there. He can't enter the city. Jerusalemites pay high taxes, but get significant privileges as a result. These Palestinians had been cut off from their livelihoods, but still had to pay Jerusalem taxes! Of course, they'll have to sell up and move away. And the only people who'll buy their houses are Israelis's - for a peppercorn price!). Standing in Abu Dis, which cuts that village in half, at the foot of the wall is an incredible experience. Literally unbelievable! A nation that is founded on the memory of the Holocaust and the Warsaw ghetto is creating just such a ghetto in its own borders.
I have become uncomfortably aware of how crucial to a gospel witness opposition to the Wall is. In 2003 American Christians gave the Israeli government $65 million towards its settlement programme. It gave them that money to deprive Christian Palestinians (among others) of their lands and livelihoods! The Christian Right has poured billions into Israel in support of their land grab policies. A combination of the OT texts about land and guilt over the Holocaust has led to an uncritical, vociferous and deadly support for Israeli oppression and terrorism in the occupied territories. What sort of witness is this? Are Palestinians to believe that the God we see in Jesus Christ sanctions this sort of oppression? Christians there are losing their faith. And the Muslims see Christianity as synonymous with American expansionism and anti-Arab policies.
When support for Israel is so loudly and effectively being proclaimed as the gospel, it is incumbent on the Church to preach the Truth, live the Truth and do the Truth! This isn't about particular political dispositions. It is about what the Truth of the God revealed in Christ means today in Palestine.
Go to http://www.stopthewall.org/ - it's a good website.